Pleure pas la bouche pleine (1973)

Annie (Annie Colé) is in her mid-teens and of a physical ripeness so strong it seems to create an invisible force around her, like a magnetic field. Annie is aware of this and she enjoys it, but she is too sweet-spirited to turn that force into a weapon. Annie inhabits an idealized provincial landscape where everything is in bloom, and where the only aggressions are of natural origin — and over and done with as quickly and as harmlessly as a summer thunderstorm.

Annie is the heroine of Pascal Thomas's bucolic, lazily funny, gently bawdy French film, "Don't Cry With Your Mouth Full" ("Pleure Pas la Bouche Pleine"), which last night opened the 12th New York Film Festival at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center.

For the first time that I can remember, the New York Film Festival has chosen as its opening night presentation a film by a virtually unknown director. "Don't Cry With Your Mouth Full" is the second film by Mr. Thomas, 28 years old, whose first film, "Les Zozos," was shown last year in the Museum of Modern Art's "New Directors/New Films" series.

Mr. Thomas may be virtually unknown here, but the men whose work seems most to have influenced him certainly are not—Jean Renoir, François Truffaut, and perhaps even Marcel Pagnol, though Mr. Pagnol's name is no longer so fashionable to invoke.

"Don't Cry With Your Mouth Full" is about one summer in Annie's life, set in a small town that would seem to be somewhere southwest of Paris and not too far from the sea. It's the kind of town where there's no great differentiation between village and countryside. Annie's father (Jean Carmet), a carpenter, has a fine sprawling garden and keeps chickens, which are, I assume, the charges of her mother (Christiane Chamaret).

Completing the household are Annie's younger sister, Friquette (whose real name is Friquette), and her grandmother (Hélène Dieudonné), a wise, self-contained old woman who is likely to toss the morning paper aside saying that "the obituaries are dull today" or to cry out in her sleep at night for her mother.

The film's focus is Annie, whom Miss Colé plays with marvelous, un-self-conscious humor. Miss Colé is a very pretty young woman but she's not an idealized beauty. She always seems to have small bruises on her arms and legs, as if on the few occasions when she has pulled herself together to practice a more elegant walk, she has bumped into chairs and tables.

Her Annie is a delightful character, and the men in her life are no match for her. The men are Frédéric (Frédéric Duru), a nice country boy who, if pressed, would rather win a cross-country bike race than roll in the haystack with Annie, and Alexandre (Bernard Menez), the town lothario, a handsome young man with a hawklike nose that inevitably reduces all his man-of-the-world mannerisms to their comic components.

Mr. Menez, who played the prop boy in Mr. Truffaut's "Day for Night" and has since become one of France's most popular young actors, is a very funny performer, full of the kind of fanaticism (about bedding Annie) that was so appealing about Charles Denner's rat-catcher in "Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me."

All the performances have a bit of this slightly mad, comic purpose, which is, I suspect, one of the reasons Mr. Thomas's work is compared with that of Renoir and Truffaut. Although "Don't Cry With Your Mouth Full" is a finely disciplined film, which doesn't seek the easy laugh or ask for gratuitous sentiment, it never suggests the dark void beyond the sunlight, something that distinguishes the work of Renoir and Truffaut and sets their films apart from all others.

This is not something that can be tacked onto a film or inserted into it, as an isolated gesture, like the scene in which Annie's father, doubling as undertaker, must dress the nude body of an old woman for burial. The scene is fine in itself but it's not enough to enrich the somewhat too sunny nature of the movie with the sort of intimations that separate good films from great ones.